John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions

The Spectral Self

M. O'Connell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349348343, 9780230361706
• eBook ISBN: 9781137365248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In reading Banville's novels through the work of key psychoanalytical theorists, John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions brings together apparently disparate thematic strands - missing twins, shame, false identities - and presents these as manifestations of a central concern with narcissism.

1

Introduction

Despite the vivid elegance of his prose and the surface of sophisticated allusion with which he textures it, there is a sense in which John Banville’s writing remains fundamentally insular. With the exception of Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), all of his novels have been written in the first-person confessional form, a narrative mode that attempts – or seems to attempt – the communication of an essence which is, at its core, incommunicable. In the typical Banville novel we are presented with a troubled male narrator’s effort to give a written account of himself, to explain himself to himself. The reader of these documents, these books of evidence, is always external or incidental to this process, as though he or she had simply stumbled across the diary of a perfect stranger and begun to turn the pages.

The reader is not the object of the documents; they are, within the internal logic of the novels, entirely self-directed. Even when the narratives are nominally ‘addressed’ to implied readers – the ‘Clio’ of The Newton Letter (1982), for instance, or the ‘My Lord’ of The Book of Evidence (1989a) – these are really just imagined surrogates for the narrator’s own self, the authority to whom he must ultimately answer. These are textual self-portraits for which the narrators are objects as well as subjects. They do not attempt depictions of themselves in order to show their faces to the world, but to themselves. As he sets about writing an account of his life as a double agent in The Untouchable (1997), Victor Maskell characterises his task as one of self-revelation: ‘I shall strip away layer after layer of grime – the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling – until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self’ (Banville, 1997: 15). The text is a mirror – more often than not a distorted one – in which an image of the self is conjured.

In Seamus Heaney’s ‘Personal Helicon’, the poet (‘big-eyed Narcissus’) refers to his art as a kind of active, creative form of reflection-gazing: ‘I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing’ (Heaney, 1998: 15). A similar impulse drives Banville’s narrators: they create their narratives in order to see themselves. They are, almost without exception, narcissists of one sort or another. In Birchwood (1973), Gabriel Godkin embarks on a picaresque odyssey to find his own imagined twin sister, his journey a quest for union with an illusory vision of himself. Similarly, his namesake Gabriel Swan in Mefisto (1986a), traumatised by the loss of a twin brother at birth, is motivated by a desire to attain a state of wholeness, to become ‘real’. Freddie Montgomery, the narrator of the trilogy comprised of The Book of Evidence (1989a), Ghosts (1993a) and Athena (1995), murders a young woman, as he sees it, because of his inability to see beyond himself. The ‘sin for which there will be no forgiveness’, he declares, is that he ‘never imagined her vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live. I could kill her because for me she was not alive’ (Banville, 1989a: 215). In The Untouchable, Victor Maskell betrays his family and commits high treason in order to bring to life an ideal vision of himself. Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, he narcissistically projects his own identity into a work of art (a fictional Poussin painting entitled The Death of Seneca), to the point where there is more at stake in his relationship with the painting than there is in any of his interpersonal connections. In Eclipse (2000a), the singularly self-obsessed actor Alexander Cleave suffers a kind of ontological crisis on stage and, turning his back on the world, retreats to the house of his birth in order to reintegrate with his fractured self. Axel Vander, his counterpart in Eclipse’s companion novel Shroud (2002), and perhaps Banville’s most supremely narcissistic protagonist, is a self-hating Jew who steals the identity of an ostensibly Gentile friend after his sudden disappearance. Vander is an unrepentant misanthrope, an anti-humanist deconstructionist who disavows the existence of truth and the reality of the self, but cannot see past his own problematic identity to the world of others. Ancient Light (2012) (which forms the third volume of a trilogy with Eclipse and Shroud) is similarly concerned with a kind of narcissistic blindness toward the lives of others. Here, Cleave looks back at an affair he had at the age of 15 with the mother of his best friend, and in whom he never takes sufficient interest to notice her terminal illness.

In each of these novels the narrative is, paradoxically, both a means by which the narrator’s narcissism is indulged and, as we shall see, a means by which an attempt is made to transcend it. In giving a narrative account of himself, the typical narrator of a Banville novel attempts to create a coherent identity and attain a unity with that identity.¹ Banville’s protagonists are always self-made men: they create themselves not merely through the way in which they live their lives, but also the way in which they narrate those lives. They are artists whose material is the impalpable substance of the self.

Given both the concept’s centrality to Banville’s work and its tendency to resist straightforward, stable definition, it will be useful at this point to outline the various interpretations of the notion of narcissism. There is, it should be stated, no one accepted definition of the term. Although it is one of the most important concepts within psychoanalytic theory, it is also among the most problematic. In order to elucidate the various interpretations of narcissism, it is best to begin with the classical myth of Narcissus, as it is in this story that all understandings of the term have their roots. In the Roman poet Ovid’s version of the myth, the naiad Liriope is raped by the river god Cephisus. When her son Narcissus, an unusually beautiful young boy, turns 15, she takes him to the seer Tiresias and asks if he will live a long life. Tiresias’s reply is affirmative, but comes with a seemingly enigmatic caveat: ‘If he shall himself not know’. Thus Narcissus’s fate is linked implicitly to the question of self-knowledge. As Narcissus becomes a man, he is approached by many admirers of both sexes, but spurns all advances: ‘hard pride/Ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth/And never a girl could touch his haughty heart’ (Ovid, 1986: 61). One day he becomes lost whilst hunting in the woods with his friends. The wood nymph Echo – whose mother, Juno, has punished her for her volubility by denying her the power to speak anything but repetition of what has just been said to her – catches sight of him and becomes instantly smitten. Narcissus calls out to his friends and is answered by Echo, who throws herself upon him. Utterly uninterested, Narcissus pushes her away, and tells her ‘be off! I’ll die before I yield to you’, to which she replies, ‘I yield to you’.

Narcissus’s rejection of Echo causes her to suffer a breakdown, in the fullest sense of that term: ‘her body shrivels, all its moisture dries;/Only her voice and bones are left; at last/Only her voice, her bones are turned to stone’. Narcissus continues scorning all admirers until one rejected youth prays for justice (‘So may he love – and never win his love!’) to the goddess Nemesis. Nemesis, the divine agent of retribution for hubris and iniquity, endorses the appeal and ensures that Narcissus falls instantly and desperately in love with his own image – his own ‘false face’ – in a ‘limpid and silvery’ pool: ‘All he admires that all admire in him,/Himself he longs for, longs unwittingly,/Praising is praised, desiring is desired,/And love he kindles while with love he burns’ (63). ‘You simple boy’, admonishes Ovid’s narrator:

why strive in vain to catch

A fleeting image? What you see is nowhere;

And what you love – but turn away – you lose!

You see a phantom of a mirrored shape;

Nothing itself; with you it came and stays;

With you it too will go, if you can go! (1986: 64)

The harder he tries to embrace himself – to attain unity with his own ‘false phantom’ – the more his infatuation is frustrated. Realising finally that it is in fact himself he has fallen in love with, he wastes away, like Echo before him, of a broken heart: ‘by love wasted, slowly he dissolves/By hidden fire consumed’ (64). Tiresias’s cryptic prophecy is borne out, with Narcissus dying a premature death because of his coming to ‘know himself’. More specifically, he dies as a result of having invested himself so completely in himself – all his attention, all his energy and passion – at the expense of all others. Narcissus’s crime is, like Freddie Montgomery’s, essentially one of negligence: a catastrophic inability or unwillingness to see beyond himself. He starves to death, both literally and figuratively; he dies because he cannot take in the world outside of himself.

The Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis, who coined the term ‘narcissism’, used the myth to explain what was then considered the pathology of homosexuality. Ellis saw homosexuality as a perverse form of self-love, whereby a man or woman is attracted to an image of him- or herself (i.e., a person of the same sex). In 1911, Freud’s colleague Otto Rank wrote the first psychoanalytic paper on narcissism, ‘Ein Beitrag zum Narcissismus’ (‘A Contribution to Narcissism’), in which he discusses the case of a woman who cannot love a man unless she is first assured of his love for her. Rank presents female narcissistic self-love as a kind of neurotic defence mechanism. Ultimately, he makes a case for considering narcissism as integral to normal sexual development.

It was Freud, however, who first constructed a substantial theory around narcissism as a significant psychological phenomenon in itself. In his 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, he distinguishes between what he terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ narcissism. Primary narcissism was, for Freud, a stage through which all children go in early infancy before they begin to see themselves as existing separately and independently from the world – most crucially the mother. It is not so much that the infant sees itself as being the centre of the world, as that it has not yet come to differentiate between itself and the world. A normal child will transcend this state of primary narcissism, becoming increasingly aware of its mother as a distinct entity, and therefore as someone who can be loved, or, to use Freud’s term, ‘libidinally cathected’. Whereas primary narcissism is, in Freud’s schema, a normal and healthy stage of human development, secondary narcissism is a pathological condition. In certain cases a person will regress toward a condition of secondary narcissism, where he or she withdraws libido from the outside world and focuses it inwardly upon the self. Characteristically, Freud lays a great deal of stress on the sexual aspect of narcissism.² The narcissist turns his sexual attention towards himself; he falls in love, as it were, with his own ‘mirrored shape’. Homosexuality was for Freud a form of narcissism brought on by a disturbed ‘libidinal development’:

We have discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed ‘narcissistic’. In this observation we have the strongest of the reasons which have led us to adopt the hypothesis of narcissism. (Freud, 1986: 30 [emphasis in original])

Freud saw the reflection of Narcissus not just in homosexuals, but also in hysterics, hypochondriacs, schizophrenics and psychotics. Narcissism was, in his view, a characteristic of any disorder in which the libido is turned away from the outside world and towards the ego.

From its very inception, the concept of narcissism has, perhaps appropriately, been bedevilled by problems of definition, by irreconcilable versions of itself. Even in the years immediately after Freud’s publication of ‘On Narcissism’, it was being used to denote a bewildering array of conditions. ‘Few concepts in psychiatry,’ as Arnold M. Cooper put it, ‘have undergone as many changes in meaning as has narcissism. Perhaps the single consistent element in these changes is the reference to some aspect of concern with the self and its disturbances’ (Cooper, 1986: 112). Such a definition, which all but reduces the term to a synonym for psychoanalysis itself, is undoubtedly too broad, but it does give some impression of the considerable ambiguity of the concept within psychoanalytic theory.

In the 1950s Annie Reich returned to the idea Freud had more or less abandoned four decades previously. Her paper ‘Pathologic Forms of Self-Esteem Regulation’ marks a progression from Freud’s view of narcissistic pathology as restricted to psychosis, disputing the ‘usefulness of a too narrowly circumscribed nosology’ (Reich, 1986: 44). Narcissism, in her view, is a normal condition that only becomes pathologic under certain specific conditions, such as in ‘states of quantitative imbalance; e.g. when the balance between object cathexis and self-cathexis has become disturbed’, and ‘in infantile forms of narcissism, which are frequently […] present in the states of quantitative imbalance’ (44). Her concept of ‘pathologic self-esteem regulation’, resulting in an excess of worldly ambition, relates specifically to the male psyche, beset in her view by the desire for phallic reassurance and anxieties about castration. Narcissistic self-inflation is, in Reich’s analysis, a form of compensation or mitigation of these peculiarly male disquietudes. Thus the obverse side of the coin of narcissism bears the indelible imprint of painful self-consciousness – a theoretical thread which would be taken up by later theorists. Narcissists are those, she maintains, who vacillate between excessive self-aggrandisement and feelings of utter worthlessness and meaninglessness. If a traumatic situation occurs at a very early stage of the child’s development, it can warp the maturation of the ego. In such instances, the affected child withdraws its attentions from the outside world and focuses them inward upon itself, like a turtle retreating into its shell: ‘Under the conditions of too frequently repeated early traumatizations, the narcissistic withdrawal of libido from the objects to the endangered self tends to remain permanent’ (49).

In this way, she conceives of what she calls ‘narcissistic imbalance’ as a defensive and an essentially negative position. That is to say, it is not so much about what the narcissist is as what he is not. ‘Magical denial’ is her term for this defensive mode: ‘“It is not so”,’ she imagines the narcissist saying, ‘“I am not helpless, bleeding, destroyed. On the contrary, I am bigger and better than anyone else. I am the greatest, the most grandiose.”’ (49) In Reich’s version of the narcissistic mind, the phallus is ‘overvalued’ due to perceived castration threats – the most conspicuous form of what she calls ‘narcissistic traumata’ – and it is the female organs which are conceived of as being ‘destroyed, bleeding, dirty, etc.’ (51). In this context, the narcissist’s entire body is ‘equated’ with a phallus. Interest is withdrawn from the outside world and the distinction between grandiose fantasy and reality becomes blurred in a way that is characteristic more of infants than of adults. ‘Thus the fantasy is not only a yardstick’, as she puts it, ‘but is also experienced as magically fulfilled’ (50).

In Banville’s work, this blurring of the distinction between the ‘real self’ (such terms, in any discussion of this writer, must always be treated with circumspection) and the phallic ideal of the self is a recurring motif. In Ghosts, Freddie Montgomery speaks approvingly of Diderot’s principle that we become ‘sculptors of the self’ through ‘cutting and shaping the material of which we are made, the intransigent stone of self-hood, and erecting an idealised effigy of ourselves in our own minds and in the minds of those around us’ (Banville, 1993a: 196). In The Untouchable, Victor Maskell echoes not just Freddie’s sentiment but also his phallically charged language:

Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves – idealised, you know, but still recognisable – and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. This is the moral imperative. I think it’s awfully clever, don’t you? I know that’s how I feel. Only there are times when I can’t tell which is the statue and which is me. (1997b: 86 [emphasis in original])

Likewise in Eclipse, Alexander Cleave, in describing his onstage ‘death’ (he comes unstuck on a line from Kleist’s Amphitryon), uses the metaphor of ‘a giant statue toppling off its pedestal and smashing into rubble on the stage’ (2000a: 87). And in Shroud, Cass Cleave describes Axel Vander (or rather Vander describes himself through her ventriloquised narrative voice) as he ‘heaved himself on top of her’ in bed as being like ‘one of those huge statues of dictators that were being pulled down all over eastern Europe’ (2002: 75–6). These conspicuously phallic images reflect Reich’s notion that the ‘grandiose body-phallus fantasy – for instance, “standing out high above everybody else, like an obelisk” – turns suddenly into one of total castration […] as though the original castration fear had extended from the penis to the whole body’ (Reich, 1986: 53 [emphasis in original]). Narcissism is, for Reich, defined every bit as much by vulnerability as it is by grandiosity, with the latter a form of compensation for the former.

Reich’s ideas are often seen as a crucial influence on Heinz Kohut and the school of self psychology which he founded. Kohut, one of the most important post-Freudian theorists of narcissism, has done more than perhaps any other psychoanalyst (including Freud himself) to define this nebulous concept. In The Analysis of the Self (1971), he argues for an understanding of narcissism as a necessary characteristic of any healthy psyc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Banville’s Narcissists
• 3 Missing Twins
• 4 The False Self
• 5 Shame
• 6 Narrative Narcissism
• 7 The Paradox of Empathy
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index